Digital Sketchbook...

Cicada Wings #2

Dead Cicada (poor fellow)...
I know they're such a weird looking thing, I find them fascinating as far as bugs go...


Three Crows on the Wires... these little guys were perched outside The Gallery, they look curious...

Branch and Trunk

This is a broken branch from my friend the old maple, I love the bleached bone look of it, and the gnarly root and trunk...

Been a bit busy lately... the book signing went well last weekend, I met a few new faces, introduced them to what I do... and did a reading (I did okay)... we might post it on YouTube... might. I was told that My Fred was just aglow with pride while I was doing my thing... I had a good time... yes, I did wear my fancy shoes!

I'm looking forward to a quiet couple of days, resting... I need it.

Ice-scapes...

I've been having fun studying icicles up close... pretty stuff... we have plenty of it after the Nor'easter dumped over 2 feet on our hilltop acre on Thursday...and it's still snowing...it hasn't really stopped...dang.

Our friend's garage fell down yesterday afternoon because of the weight of the snow...be careful out there!

I've been deep into the final proofreading of The Fractured Hues of White Light and have reached the halfway point...I'm reading the whole proof backwards so I'm in chapter 14 today, and hope to be entering chapter 13 by tonight...not "going with the flow" really helps me catch the last stragglers that I want out, or if I'm really unhappy with a sentence, I'll rewrite it on the spot. I'll do my best to make it as 'squeaky clean' as possible before she is printed...

I'm putting up two copies of Dusty Waters: A Ghost Story for a giveaway at Library Thing, starting today I believe...I didn't see it on the list yet, it was still pending as of this morning...

Please enjoy the photos of the "Ice-scapes"...there's critter pictures at the end...

I'm a sucker for the vertical orientation of these shards of ice... I tried a few horizontal, but enjoyed them more as verticals...





This is "Pinky 'Possum' who has been visiting our bird feeders for about a week, she's not very big (that's why I think she's a she, the lady opossums tend to be smaller than the boyz.) She is quiet and doesn't seem to mind us much, I have to keep Max on a leash while she's there, he's soooo excited to make friends, but I don't want him to tangle with the little fur ball, make her play dead or anything... I just love that little face (and she does wiggle the little ears, how funny!) I'm sure, there will be moments when she'll become a nuisance critter... if necessary, I'll trap her in a have-a-heart and release her so she can be happy somewhere else.



I caught a rather blurry shot of a crow landing on the snow, I loved the open wing...I'm fooling around with it in Photoshop, this is what I have so far...

Last but not least, my faithful dog, the Best of Good Boys, Max! (The day after the snow storm, after my Fred dug out the driveway!) For ONCE he looked at the camera with ears in full bloom!

Of wind and snow, photos and drawings, writing and painting...

Windy and snowy, lake effect...tomorrow is supposed to be a wintery mix mess...lovely...
Here is my little crow friend...the initial picture wasn't that great, so I played around and made use of it's blurriness to make a more "painterly" or "sketchy" image of a black bird against the winter sky...

Joy! This is one of my most favorite drawings...it's a tiny thing, but it means the world to me...I think of Beethoven's 9th when I look at it...such a big symphony...sometimes it's hard to explain what I do when I make these images, I play around, make a mark, follow it to the next and so on...
This little watercolor the same thing...follow the water, the tide line, emphasis with a pencil to bring out this and that...this is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata...
This photo of the woods out back at sunset reminds me of a Wolf Kahn painting...I love his work...
(Pastel by Wolf Kahn, Horizontal Study for "Vertical", 2007 14 x 17 inches, Thomas Segal Gallery)


I walked around the yard a lot yesterday with my little digital camera (Fuji Finepix A900, just a wee thing, it does what I want), then I dashed outside in my maryjanes at twilight to snag pictures of the sunset...but out of all of them, I love this blurry bit...it reminds me of Mark Rothko...








(Mark Rothko, Untitled,1969, Collection of Kate Rothko Prizel)

I've been writing about my new character Eleanor Dean...she's a painter, and having a bit of a struggle making sense of the attitudes about art...I will admit to some biographical borrowing for Elly's experience at art school...it's just been a fun chapter to write and I keep adding to it everyday...it's been an inspiring week...browsing through old sketchbooks, reading a great deal of art theory and aesthetics, studying Plato's Republic to confirm my memory of his objections about the arts and recalling Rudy Giuliani's over the top gripe with the Chris Ofili painting of the Virgin Mary at the Brooklyn Museum...I've seen worse things...




So much material to work with...here's a brief excerpt (I had posted a rougher version earlier today, and have since updated it):

The recipe for a foreshadow of things to come—a healthy, active imagination, a blank piece of paper, just add crayons, and my destiny to become an artist simmered quietly until the Second-Grade when I was the only kid who made the Easter Brontosaurus while the other good little children copied cute, brown construction paper bunnies with pink noses exactly as the teacher told them how to do it. Oh, yes, it was very perceptible that what I did was very wrong—a grave mistake in judgment. It was bad enough to be scolded by the teacher for not following directions, but to have everyone else laugh at me for being so weird made the day complete. What they really meant to say was Oh, that was so—creative—inventive—ingenious! Oh, how artistic! But no one wanted to apply such positive reinforcement on the Easter Brontosaurus because it was easier to say it was weird and be done with it. Anyway, there’s no such thing as the Easter Bunny either—so there.

Here I go again...so much to do...It's been fun writing a new book...it's going to be years in the making...new novels do take a very long time to come into being, this one is coming together after years of gathering bits and pieces, I'm just sorting them out, connecting the dots, and going with the flow...it just feels so good to start a new manuscript!